“And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.”

I have been fighting (literally, it seems!) with OpenOffice Writer for 2 days! I have been trying to put together an ebook of Dr N B Kennedy’s Civil War service, and Writer has been bucking me all the way. It’s probably me, as I have never taken so much as one “office” class, such as typing or how to use an office-type computer program or the like. Yesterday I had the entire book complete, with but a few little typos yet to resolve, and somehow I managed to freeze Writer over and over again! I even found an online word processor that I could upload my file to, and it froze! Apparently in creating the file, I turned left instead of turning right and created a corrupt or otherwise unopenable file. I had saved a bit of the manuscript as a simple text file, but most of it was lost when I was forced to delete the entire file. Writer would not open at all as long as the file was on my hard drive!

Of course I still have all of the original documents and those graphics that I had created for the book, so when I got home from work this afternoon, I began the book anew.

So now I am about halfway through the “rewrite”, as it is much simpler to put it together a second time. Hopefully, the ebook will be finished (again!) by tomorrow evening and I will be able to upload it to my Lulu storefront.

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One thought on “An office person I’m not!”

Ruth, I wonder if the size of the file might be your problem. The “freezing” may just be the system trying to process all that information every time you open, save or update the file. Especially with high resolution scans of your source documents and such, the book file can get humongous quickly. You might try building the book with each section or chapter a separate file. I had to do that with my cookbook. It makes editing much easier when OOo – or any word processor – isn’t trying to rewrite several gigs of data every time you add a paragraph.

Lulu will let you upload each chapter separately – also much easier to manage – and pull it all together at the site.